Lorna Writes

I will return to the chronological narrative of my life in subsequent posts. For right now, I want to step back and take a little (or maybe not-so-little after all, now that I've finished this post!) look at the trajectory of my life and my thoughts after that experience with the tree, from the perspective I have now, 15 years after it happened. It has felt like a welcome cascade of remembering things I already knew, but paradoxically, I had no idea how difficult it would be to actually integrate this 9th dimensional experience into my 3-dimensional life. It is definitely a very unfinished adventure, and I'm continually reminded of how unfinished I am!     ------------------ I had never in my life felt drawn to the concept of "enlightenment." This word has more than one meaning, of course, but in the religious or philosophical realm, it always seemed to be an abstraction that I couldn't grasp enough to want. I got a double major when I was in college, in both biol...

I don't know whether the words "in the 9th dimension" in the title of this post will make people immediately pass it by, because I'm clearly a kook..or whether it will intrigue people, or whether it's just too far out to mean anything to anyone other than me and a couple other kooks that I know... Either way, there it is. I'm not as afraid of going public with the most profoundly intense experience of my life as I used to be. I am still trying to absorb and embody the experience 18 years after it happened.  SO WHAT HAPPENED?! I've been working my way up the timeline to the point when this happened, and now I'm finally here... I talked in the previous couple posts about the gatherings that certain healers were having around where I lived in 2007. In late fall of that year, one of those healers invited people to her home to listen in on a conference call of a guided meditation by a woman in Colorado named Aine, (pronounced Anya.) I hadn't met Aine at...

Prelude #1 One of these posts will eventually get around to really describing fully what I mean when I use the word "initiation." I was being drawn into something that I didn't see the big picture of when I started, and along the way I would encounter books and friends and teachers that helped me to put a framework to this journey. One of the most potent frameworks that emerged was the indigenous concept of initiation as described by Martin Prechtel in his incredible book, "Long Life, Honey in the Heart." This book describes the year-long initiation of the young people in the Mayan village where he lived, and his part in leading this transformational year for the adolescent young men. One salient feature of initiation in this village was that the young people were chosen and yanked from their families when they were seen to be falling in love for the first time with another young villager. The potent energies of falling in love with a human were harnessed for th...

The beautiful new relationship that began when my marriage ended ran into its first little bump three months after it started. It seemed like a small bump that was easily recovered from. Nick (not his real name,) and I and my 11-year-old son spent a weekend in early June of 2007 attending a gathering called the Wild Food Summit, held on the White Earth Indian Reservation. We joined a few dozen people who were camping for three days and learning about foraging from several experienced experts from the region. It was an exhilarating and fun time, poking around in the woods and swamps and fields and making meals together from the things that we had found. I was feeling very much in love with Nick.  We hadn't spent much time together in the presence of crowds of strangers, and I was  admiring how he interacted in his warm and friendly way with the other participants and with my son. I was very happy to be there as his partner. As for myself, I was feeling a bit shy and weird and a...